Name: Neil Pasricha

Claim to Fame: Neil is the New York Times bestselling author of  The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, and three other books. His books have sold over a million copies worldwide. Neil also has one of the most popular TED Talks of all time with “The 3 A’s of Awesome.” His new podcast, 3 Books, discusses the most formative books of inspiring individuals from all walks of life.

Where to Find Him: On Amazon, Twitter, and his website.

Let’s start with the basics. Give us some context. What have you written? What are you most well-known for? And what are your current projects?

I’ve written a daily updated blog called 1000 Awesome Things, five published books, a bunch of calendars and journals, and columns for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and The Toronto Star. My most well-known books are The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation.

My current project is a podcast called 3 Books where I am attempting to find and read the world’s 1000 most formative books. To do that I’m asking 333 inspiring individuals to share their three most formative books with me.

I publish one chapter of 3 Books on the exact minute of every new moon and full moon from March 31, 2018 to September 1, 2031. Sample guests include Judy Blume, David Sedaris, Mitch Albom, Gretchen Rubin, Sarah Andersen, Tim Urban, and Seth Godin.

You’ve written a lot. And you’re also changing in your writing a lot. Are there any rituals or routines that assist your writing practice?

I generally write around 9:30am to noon three days a week. Would I like to write more? Sure. But I’m not going to lie and say I do.

I have three parts to my morning routine before I write and they all help my writing. Before I get into them I want to point out I got anxious as these routines started appearing because I worried they were diverting me away from writing … but over time I made peace with them and now see them as helping.

1)Perspective. I wake up to one of my two little roosters crowing around 5am and then head downstairs and make a giant, messy elaborate breakfast with them involving fried mushrooms, egg sandwiches, and green smoothies before going on a meandering, robin-and-rabbit-hole-spotting, stick-and-leaf-collecting walk to school. Tender little hands sneaking swirls of butter on stools beside me … grounds me. Writing doesn’t matter with this zoom out and I feel riskier and looser with my words later.

 

2) Energy. I do a silent heavy weights workout at the gym. Nothing fancy. Maybe Push, Pull, Legs or 5×5. Why silent? I found I was lifting 10-20% less when listening to podcasts. (I now leave my phone in my locker because even carrying it in Airplane Mode distracts me.) The workout zaps swirling seas of stress in my stomach for about 48 hours. So a good week has three workouts, a great one has four.

 

3) Creativity. If I’m working on something very creative I sometimes zone into my work with a couple squares of Lindt 90% dark chocolate or a small dose of a sativia such as a Tangie strain. Combined with headphones at a coffee shop and disabled Wifi this helps me zone into my writing while (ideally) remaining fun and playful with my words.

Do you have a writing visualization, confidence boosters, or focus technique?

I do have a visualization, actually.

I picture myself as this hulking Kong-like gorilla curled over a tiny computer. Me the Gorilla is totally dominant. I own that keyboard. I could shatter the screen with a headbutt or snap the keyboard like an Olive Garden breadstick.

This image lets me zoom out into Super Writer mode and feel more confident about what I’m putting down.

The gorilla doesn’t need to impress anybody.

The gorilla feels no worries or doubts.

That’s interesting. Do you do anything else to enable “the gorilla” mindset while you’re writing?

One thing.

I wear no shirt and crawl on my fists to the corner of the coffee shop to take a dump every few hours.

No, seriously, the only other thing is I always write in 18-point font.

This habit began when I edited my college comedy paper and we just had shitty desktop computers with bad resolution and sticky red chicken ball sauce stuck in all the keyboards.

But now it’s a habit.

I’m writing this Q&A in 18-point font right now. So my words are big on the page. So I fill up pages faster. So my words feel more confident to me and that inspires more confidence as I’m writing.

And background noise?

Right.

I like one or two things.

The high level strategy is ambient sound and images.

I loved Nassim Taleb’s “Why I Do All This Walking” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” essay which talk about filling your mind with perspective and creative stimulation. So while I love walking, I can’t actually write while walking, so I do the next best thing. I go to a variety of coffee shops with digital art on the walls, lots of pshh-pshhing, people watching, and wood beams.

What was the best money you ever spent as an author?

First, I’ll tell you what the best money I didn’t spend was on.

Goddamn Strunk and White. The Elements of Style. I read that shit in high school and I just read Stephen King’s “On Writing” which was a great book but even he goes on about how Strunk and White is so great. You know what it did to me? Scared me. How am I supposed to follow all these rules about adverbs and conjugated nouns and using the wrong there? Screw that. Spellcheck can fix that. Writers are trying to take thoughts and fire them onto paper like lightning bolts. I reject almost all writing advice. Bird By Bird had great elements – but again, stressed me out. Too much do it this way, don’t do it that way. No! Just do it. Same with writing courses, script-writing software, blah, blah, blah.

So, that leads into my best purchase.

It’s this pair of $30 Logitech headphones – with a mouthpiece! It’s perfect for podcasts over Skype when you need one. And, importantly, it helps me tune out the world. Related to the last question, if I do get stuck next to a pair of Chatty Chads at the coffee shop I just carefully enable Wifi – avoiding email and having all notifications disabled – and then head over to Calmsound.com to listen to some nature sounds to drown them out.

Finding a great idea for a book can be one of the most challenging aspects of an author’s life. You’ve successfully done it several times now. Where do you find your book ideas? Are there habits or daily tricks you use to think about book ideas?

Really? I feel like ideas are the easy part. Almost nothing I want to read is already written. I want the definitive guide to being a dad in the modern world. Where is it? I want a real warts-and-all look at smoking weed and being creative. Help me, world. Where is it? I want a helpful list of tactics I can use to balance my ridiculous ambition and contentment streaks. Who got that? Nobody. I go on mental rants like this all day. I want this, I need that, where is it?

What perfect piece of writing would help you do something you want to do?

Chances are good it doesn’t exist.

So go.

Taking these personal needs and channeling them into books almost sounds too easy. Can you give us a couple examples on how you did that?

Sure.

Here are the stories behind my two most popular books.

After my wife left me and my best friend took his own life I started writing down one awesome thing a day on a free WordPress blog to cheer myself up. I needed the therapy. That blog went viral, won a ton of awards, and eventually those blog posts got printed out, stapled together, and literally are The Book of Awesome.

A few years later I met Leslie, we started dating, and over time we fell in love and got married. On the flight home from our honeymoon she told me she was pregnant. (Like, she bought the pregnancy test in the Kuala Lumpar airport on our layover and did the pregnancy test in the tiny airplane bathroom.) When I got home I began writing a 300-page letter to my unborn son on how to life a happy life. That letter is The Happiness Equation.

In The Happiness Equation you talk about setting goals for your book that were dependent on external validation: sales figures, bestseller lists, pageviews, accolades. Each time you achieved your goals—some quite lofty—you didn’t feel fulfilled in the way you’d hoped. How do you measure your success as an author these days, or what does literary success look like to you?

Yeah. Goddamn goals. They kill me. Hit one mole with a hammer and the next one pops right up.

In The Happiness Equation I talk about three types of success: Sales (pageviews, copies shipped!), Social (critical reviews, awards!), and Self (I like what I did!).

These days I’m trying to focus more on that third S – Self. This focus is partly inspired by the essay “The Nature of The Fun” by David Foster Wallace where he reminds us that after commercial success you are always tempted to chase it again… but you really just have to rediscover whatever you found fun in the first place. Of course, he puts it much better than me. I recommend buying his book “Both Flesh And Not” which includes the full essay. I reread it at least once a year.

How do you do it in practice?

Well, take 3 Books for example. I’ve put in place three systems to help avoided slipping into the trap of chasing numbers (which my brain would like to do):

1)No ads. I have no ads, no sponsors, no commercials. It’s not because I like to pretend I’m a mountaintop guru who wants a quieter world. (Although I do like to pretend that.) It’s because I don’t want to think about ads, invoices, dollars, CPM this, CPM that, about recording ads, about numbers, about all this shit that is not my art.

2) No passwords. To what? My stats. I don’t have a password to my own Libsyn account where I would need to go to check 3 Books stats. Don’t get me wrong. If 3 Books hits The Top 100 on iTunes I’ll tweet about it. But I can’t actually check how many downloads I have without asking someone.

3) A goal I really care about. This is the biggest. On the show I’m trying to read a thousand formative books over my life. I genuinely want to do that! We get about 30000 days to live. So I want to read the 1000 most formative books and share them with others. It’s a real goal in the sense that I really want to do it. With The Book of Awesome I really wanted to cheer myself up. With The Happiness Equation I really wanted my son to have a letter on how to be happy. This is huge and if you find yourself asking how you can outsource writing your own book … well, are you sure you want to do it?

What’s your process for editing your own work if you have one?

I have a controversial editing principle I don’t necessarily believe … but which I hold in my head to help me navigate editing.

Here it is:

“Editors are generally right in telling me what’s wrong but generally wrong in telling me what’s right.”

I try to hold that in my head. Grip it firmly.

“Editors are generally right in telling me what’s wrong but generally wrong in telling me what’s right.”

What does that mean?

Well, the first time I got the edited 300-page Word document for The Book of Awesome back from my editor I almost had a panic attack. It looked like it had been in a car accident. Blood and red streaks everywhere. There were so many Comments in the margins they touched each other all the way down the entire document.

So I felt like I needed be two conflicting people to get through the editing process.

1)Mr. Bozo The Punching Balloon: The smiling zero defensiveness guy who just looooooooves constructive feedback, never gets angry, and always pops back up.

2) Mr. Angry Gorilla On A Tiny Keyboard. That angry, over confident, assertive writer guy who unleashes words on a page in the strong, spirited way a master artist splatters paint on a canvas. He does whatever he wants so get out of his way.

Here’s a picture of the two characters to help you visualize them:

So hence the line:

“Editors are generally right in telling me what’s wrong…”

Translation: Accept it, accept it, accept it, accept it. Be Bozo. Their brains are better trained to find problems, flow issues, logic gaps. Let them. Accept them. Embrace them.

“…but generally wrong in telling me what’s right.”

Translation: They haven’t written a book. I’m the writer! I’m the guy writing this thing. That’s me. Get back to my own gut and heart and brain and splatter that paint on the canvas with confidence.

Is it true? No, of course not. It’s overly simplistic at best. But that doesn’t mean I can’t hold it in my mind to navigate the editing process with confidence to accept their changes and confidence to deliver my own back.

Remember: Be Bozo and Kong.

You started a blog, 1000AwesomeThings.com, where you wrote a post about one awesome thing every day like old, dangerous playground equipment, getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, or the moment at a concert after the lights go out and before the band comes on stage. What has been the biggest challenge in going from the shorter form posts to writing your books?

Organization.

If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling up a 300-page document trying to find that one paragraph you wrote about swimming where you can put that one quote you read from a Nike executive in a Harper’s article ten years ago which you know you have saved in one of your thirteen browser tabs or six Evernote folders … you know what I’m talking about.

Everyone says that the first step to being a good writer is to read good writing. What do you read? How much do you read? Do you have a favorite author, perhaps someone you try to emulate?

For most of my adult life I read maybe five books a year.

And then two years ago I suddenly read fifty.

And then last year I read a hundred.

A hundred books in one year. The old me would have taken twenty years to read that much. And suddenly reading has become the lead domino to feeling like a better husband, father, son, brother, writer, and speaker. Everything has improved! So why didn’t I read more? I gave that classic excuse. “No time! Ain’t got no time!”

But that’s bullshit.

When I looked back I found eight small systems I’d put in place to dramatically increase my reading.

I wrote them down in a Harvard Business Review article last year called “8 Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books This Year” which ended up becoming their Most Read article for something like six months.

The link above has the full piece but here are three of the headlines:

1)Centralize it in your home. My wife Leslie and I moved our TV into our unfinished basement and had a built-in bookshelf installed just inside our front door.

2) Make a public commitment. I stole Ryan Holiday’s idea for a monthly book club and now send over 35,000 people a list of books I’ve read and enjoyed each month. I put up a website to ask people to join. And now every month I have pressure to send out that email. Anybody can do this with a Twitter or Goodreads commitment.

3) Find a few trusted, curated lists. I’m hoping 3 Books becomes a trusted list for people. A couple other lists I enjoy are Bill Gates’s GatesNotes Reviews and Derek Sivers’s Books I’ve Read. I also recommend everyone find a personal bookseller who knows and helps them grow their tastes. Mine is Sarah Ramsey at Book City Bloor Village in Toronto and I interviewed her in Chapter 4 of 3 Books.

When did your aspirations to be a writer begin? What are common traps aspiring authors should try to avoid?

Here’s the trap.

Calling yourself a writer.

Why? Well, here’s my take.

And the big caveat here is that I’m the son of hardcore Indian immigrants. My parents aren’t trumpet players and oil painters who raised me amongst Manhattan’s cultural elite. They’re a high school teacher and accountant who raised me in the suburbs with the adage to “Go be a doctor” or, at least, “Don’t quit your day job.”

So, with that said.

I am thirty-eight years old. I have been writing for thirty years. I have been calling myself a writer for two years.

Why?

Because I don’t think writing should ever be about “being a writer.”

It should be about creativity, passion for storytelling, clarifying thoughts, spreading a message, and expressing yourself. Why am I writing thousands of words for this blog interview? All of the above! It’s not because I’m a writer. It’s because I’m having fun with people I respect.

So I wrote ghost stories for my hometown newspaper as a kid, created the “Portable 6 Press” in sixth grade, wrote and eventually edited my high school newspaper, worked forty hours a week for four straight years in college writing and eventually editing my college humor paper, and then writing a thousand blog posts a thousand weekdays in a row on 1000 Awesome Things.

But I never did any of that full time and I never did any of that for a single dollar and I never did any of that to “be a writer.”

Somebody once asked Todd Hanson, former Editor of The Onion, how to get paid writing jokes. The question was something along the lines of “So buddy, you got a horseshoe tossed up your ass! How do I get one, too?” And I loved his response. It was simply: “Do it for free for ten years.”

And that’s it. Do it because you love it. I did it because I loved it. And love was what powered me.

Even when big book deals started coming, I didn’t quit my job. I was on the executive track at Walmart. So I did both for eight years. Writing a daily blog post, writing five books, giving speeches … all while working full-time at Walmart.

And only two years ago, at the very end of those eight years doing both, with a new marriage and children who I wanted to be home with at night and on weekends, and only when I felt I couldn’t physically do both any longer, doing corporate conference calls upstairs in hotel rooms before going downstairs to speeches or book signings, only when the stretched-out taffy strings holding all those things together finally sagged and snapped into sticky spiderwebs blowing in the air…. only then did I say goodbye to the corporate job and only then did I “become a writer.”

In an interview for 3 Books, Seth Godin told me that until the ages of Hemingway nobody called themselves a writer. It wasn’t a job! It wasn’t a formal profession. Find me a writer a hundred years ago. There were probably a dozen on the planet. It just wasn’t a thing you did, full time, for money. If you did it you just did it because you did it.

I like that.

Because I think calling yourself a writer before you feel compelled to write full-time is like a giant invisible cinder block on your shoulders. What do writers do? They write. They wake up and write and write and write and write. They wrote yesterday, they’re writing today, they’re writing tomorrow. Do you do that? I doubt it. Not many people do! So why pressure yourself by telling everyone you do?

I say if you can hold onto both – your writing job and your full-time job – then you create risk-taking in both. Your full-time job pays you. So you can take risks in your writing! You don’t have to monetize it and serve the crowd and sell ads and try to fit yet another book into some tiny sliver in a crowded marketplace that may just shrug when you announce your existence. You just get to write what you love with your full heart and that is what will make it good and that is what will make it popular. Plus, your writing makes you quite the mouthy person at work since you have another thing out there. And nothing gets promotions in big companies more than speaking truth to power.

Do you have any final words of advice or thoughts?

I am just one guy and I am living just one life as just one gender in just one country in just one brain in just one moment in time.

Anything I’ve said that resonates with you means you already feel it and know it inside yourself. Anything I’ve said that doesn’t – good. Chuck it and keep going. It’s just as important to toss out what doesn’t work for you as to keep what does.

Anyone reading this can hit me up at neil@globalhappiness.org if you have questions or reactions which I didn’t address. And thanks for Writing Routines. I appreciate the hard work that goes into it. Thanks for asking me to chat about writing.